Demographic data

This is a big one. You can now view demographic data for your audience by integrating with DoubleClick.

This is new data, and will allow businesses to segment particular visitor groups for the purpose of remarketing, or perhaps to see which products are selling most from a certain age group. The potential uses are interesting.

According to Dan Barker:

This is the big one really from most users' point of view. Something that really gives utterly new data to every website owner. The demographic reports themselves will be useful and interesting.

On top of those though, they're adding demographic segmentation. You will be able to view virtually any report in Google Analytics, segmented down by a particular demographic criteria. The possibilities there are almost endless. There are very simple uses, but also quite sophisticated ones.

Google Tag Manager: auto event tracking

This takes a lot of pain out of the job for analytics users. From now, Auto-Event Tracking allows Google Tag Manager users to 'listen' for events on the page without adding any custom code, before sending data to Google Analytics or other tags.

Historically, if you wanted something tracked as an event you'd need to manually code it into the html of the page. That's fine in smaller scenarios, but in an enterprise environment it's usually going to means bugging a developer to make a change, and with staging and testing it can be a long and uncomfortable process.

This announcement suggests that GTM will make all that a thing of the past, which will really open things up. You can track a lot more with Google Analytics if you make use of Events.

Tool to migrate from 'classic' analytics to 'universal'

Dan Barker:

Google has hinted about this for a while, and I think some website owners are getting a bit fed up of the mixed messages around classic/universal. It will be great to get to a point where you can migrate across and retain your historic data.

More educational tools

This could be a useful feature for amateurs like me, or for smaller businesses with fewer resources. This essentially encourages people to use Google Analytics and learn 'on the go'.

Every feature in Google Analytics will now have an in-product video that users can watch for more information about how to use a certain feature. Very handy.

BigQuery integration

This new feature allows user to access their session and use data from Analytics within Google BigQuery for more granular and complex querying of unsampled data.

I'll let Google explain:

For those unfamiliar with Google BigQuery, it’s a web service that lets you perform interactive analysis of massive data sets—up to trillions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand. Plus, your data is easily exportable.

New acquisition report

This has been available to some already, but will be rolled out to all users over the next few weeks.

It will replace the ‘Traffic’ Sources’ section on the left hand menu of GA, and allows users to see how customers/visitors are acquired, their subsequent behaviour on site, and conversions.

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Comments (7)

I think one of the most useful parts of 'age/gender/interest segmentation' will be if people use it along with other tools.

For example, if you can couple it with Google Analytics Remarketing, you can do odd things like ask: "what was the rough demographic makeup of my top 10% of customers?" and then say "ok, which other site visitors matched that profile but *did not* convert?" to set up a remarketing list within analytics itself & reach those people (even segmented further by any other activity they carried out on the site). It also nudges the idea of using regular display ads to say "send me more of these types of people". And, of course, there's no reason they couldn't automate that & turn it into a push-button option if they chose to do so.

As Google build more advertising tools and formats, it would make sense if they position Google Analytics as the central data/insight source to measure their results, and also perhaps to control the ads. For example: The fact that AdWords and Analytics are separate is sort of an odd legacy thing.

Interesting days ahead for Online marketers. First Google completely removes Keyword data from Google analytics, followed by new search algo update Hammingbird, and now new features in Google Analytics.

Digital marketing, this industry is changing like anything and with Google focusing more on providing more quality results to users, these are all steps to improve quality of search results and remove spam completely from search index.

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